by Dohra Ahmad
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MIGRATION LITERATURE
DOHRA AHMAD is professor of English at St. John’s University. She is the author of Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America, editor of Rotten English: A Literary Anthology, and coauthor (with Shondel Nero) of Vernaculars in the Classroom: Paradoxes, Pedagogy, Possibilities. Ahmad also contributed an introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Housing Lark by Trinidadian author Sam Selvon. Born in Chicago, she has lived in Amsterdam, Lahore, and San Francisco, and now lives in Brooklyn with her family.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT is the author of numerous books, including Everything Inside; The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist; Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times Notable Book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and Krik? Krak!, also a National Book Award finalist. A 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner and the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant, Danticat has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere.
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Published in Penguin Books 2019
Introduction and selection copyright © 2019 by Dohra Ahmad
Foreword copyright © 2019 by Edwidge Danticat
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A portion of the foreword by Edwidge Danticat was published in different form in “We Must Not Forget Detained Migrant Children” in The New Yorker, June 26, 2018.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Ahmad, Dohra, editor, author of introduction. | Danticat, Edwidge, author of foreword.
Title: The Penguin book of migration literature : departures, arrivals, generations, returns / edited with an introduction by Dohra Ahmad ; foreword by Edwidge Danticat.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004724 (print) | LCCN 2019010719 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133384 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780525505167 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration in literature. | Immigrants in literature. | Exiles in literature.
Classification: LCC PN56.E59 (ebook) | LCC PN56.E59 P47 2019 (print) | DDC 808.8/03552—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004724
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Cover illustration by Matt Huynh
Version_1
For migrants everywhere
Contents
About the Editor and Contributor
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by EDWIDGE DANTICAT
Introduction by DOHRA AHMAD
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MIGRATION LITERATURE
DEPARTURES
no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark
—WARSAN SHIRE, “HOME”
Olaudah Equiano, from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
West Africa → Barbados
M. NourbeSe Philip, “Zong! #5”
West Africa →
Julie Otsuka, “Come, Japanese!”
Japan → USA
Francisco Jiménez, “Under the Wire”
Mexico → USA
Eva Hoffman, from Lost in Translation
Poland → Canada
Mohsin Hamid, from How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
village → city
Edwidge Danticat, “Children of the Sea”
Haiti →
Paulette Ramsay, from Aunt Jen
Jamaica → UK
Dinaw Mengestu, “An Honest Exit”
Ethiopia → Sudan → Italy → UK → USA
Salman Rushdie, “Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies”
Pakistan → UK
Warsan Shire, “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)”
Somalia → UK
Dunya Mikhail, “Another Planet”
Earth → other planet
ARRIVALS
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.
—CLAUDE McKAY, “THE TROPICS IN NEW YORK”
Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”
West Africa → North America
Claude McKay, “The Tropics in New York”
Jamaica → USA
E. R. Braithwaite, from To Sir, With Love
Guyana → UK
Sam Selvon, “Come Back to Grenada”
Grenada → UK
Shauna Singh Baldwin, “Montreal 1962”
India → Canada
Emine Sevgi Özdamar, from The Bridge of the Golden Horn
Turkey → Germany
Marjane Satrapi, from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
Iran → Austria
Marina Lewycka, from Strawberry Fields
Ukraine → UK
Deepak Unnikrishnan, from Temporary People
India → United Arab Emirates
Djamila Ibrahim, “Heading Somewhere”
Ethiopia → Canada/Syria
GENERATIONS
defining myself my own way any way many many ways
—TATO LAVIERA, “AMERÍCAN”
Mena Abdullah, “The Time of the Peacock”
India → Australia
Mehdi Charef, from Tea in the Harem
Algeria → France
Joseph Bruchac, “Ellis Island”
Native American/Russia → USA
David Dabydeen, “Coolie Mother” and “Coolie Son (The Toilet Attendant Writes Home)”
India → Guyana → UK
Shani Mootoo, “Out on Main Street”
India → Trinidad and Tobago → Canada
Hanif Kureishi, “My Son the Fanatic”
Pakistan → UK
Zadie Smith, from White Teeth
Jamaica → UK
Tato Laviera, “AmeRícan”
Puerto Rico → mainland USA
Sefi Atta, “Green”
Nigeria → USA
Safia Elhillo, “origin stories (reprise)”
Sudan → USA
RETURNS
Pauline Kaldas, “A Conversation”
Egypt → USA → Egypt
About the Authors
Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing
Acknowledgments
Foreword
/> One of my earliest childhood memories is of being torn away from my mother. I was four years old and she was leaving Haiti for the United States to join my father, who’d emigrated two years earlier, to escape both a dictatorship and poverty. My mother was entrusting my younger brother and me to the care of my uncle and his wife, who would look after us until our parents could establish permanent residency—they had both traveled on tourist visas—in the United States.
On the day my mother left, I wrapped my arms around her legs before she headed for the plane. She leaned down and tearfully unballed my fists so that my uncle could peel me off her. As my brother dropped to the floor, bawling, my mother hurried away, her tear-soaked face buried in her hands. She couldn’t bear to look back.
Even the type of carefully planned separation that my parents chose tore their hearts out. Whenever they were eating, my mother used to say, they wondered whether my brother and I were eating, too. When they went to bed at night, they wondered if my brother and I were sleeping. Even though we spoke to them on a scheduled call once a week, they never stopped worrying and longing for us.
It is perhaps that ache and longing that made my parents take me to visit Haitian refugees and asylum seekers who were being held at a detention center near the Brooklyn Navy Yard when our family was reunited in New York, in the early 1980s. I have continued to visit detention facilities over the years, including ones where children are held, either alone or with their parents. At a children’s facility in Cutler Bay, Florida, most of the boys and girls had been detained for so long that they’d transitioned from childhood to adolescence behind those walls. Then there were the Miami hotels turned detention centers, where women and children were being held for weeks or months at a time. Up to six women spent twenty-four hours a day in one room, often with crying babies and toddlers, while armed guards patrolled the halls.
One of the most distressing aspects of migration, for both adults and children, is how invisible the migrant can become, even when being detained, or imprisoned, in our proverbial backyards. When vulnerable populations are kept hidden, or are forced into hiding—which is the daily reality of so many undocumented migrants, immigrants, and refugees—they not only live in the shadows; they become slowly erased and their voices become muffled or go unheard.
That’s why it’s so illuminating to have a book like this at this particular time, an indispensable anthology full of intimate and deeply moving poems, short stories, novels, and memoirs about what it’s like to live on the margins of borders today. This book dares to ask what departures, arrivals, and returns are like, what being “in motion” means at a time when, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 68.5 million of our fellow human beings are coming and going because of war or economic, environmental, or political instability.
The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns also explores what home is and can become. Is home the place where we are born, where, as we say in Haiti, our umbilical cords are buried? Or is home the place we die, where we are buried? Or is home the place where we toil in between? The place to which we’ve sacrificed our youth, our strength, the place to which we have given the best years of our lives? Some of us are born speaking one language and will die speaking another. We are seeds in one soil and weeds in another.
We don’t always get to decide where we call home. Many times it is others who decide, gatekeepers, immigration officers, border guards. Is home where, as the physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said, “our feet may leave, but not our hearts”? Or is it as the novelist, essayist, and activist James Baldwin wrote, “not a place but simply an irrevocable condition”? Do we define home as where we welcome others in, or as where we keep others out? These days it certainly seems as though the latter is prevailing, but the voices you are reading here will not be pushed out. They will not go unheard.
“Tell us,” the novelist Toni Morrison said in her 1993 Nobel lecture, “what it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”
These writers more than tell us. They show us. They pull us in and draw us out. They invite us into homes, families, souls.
Human beings have been migrating since the beginning of time. We have always traveled from place to place, looking for better opportunities, where they exist, and no matter how many walls are built, this will not change. After all, raging, seemingly impassable seas have not stopped migrants from leaving places that, as the Somali-Kenyan-British poet Warsan Shire has written, won’t let them stay.
As I am writing this, seven thousand mostly Honduran migrants are traveling on foot through Mexico and heading to the United States in what is considered one of the largest “caravans” of US-bound Central American migrants on record. Made up mostly of families, including young children, this group is fleeing poverty, gang activity, and one of the highest murder rates in the world. These people are risking everything, including separation from their children, for the mere possibility of a better life. I wonder what stories they will eventually tell about this journey and others they have been on. I wonder what their children will have to say. Perhaps those who have preceded them, including many of the writers in this book, will set a blueprint for them and open the gates, so to speak, for their voices to be heard.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT
Introduction
Every year, millions of people move to a new country. From war refugees to corporate expats, migrants constantly reshape their places of origin and arrival. It is rare for a single day to pass without news coverage of the many migrations—voluntary and involuntary, documented and undocumented—that characterize contemporary life. Over the past several decades, sociologists, demographers, political scientists, and economists have given their academic views on the causes and effects of migration. For an equally valid and possibly more nuanced perspective, we can turn to literary sources: poems, short stories, novels, memoirs, and graphic novels. For migrants and nonmigrants alike, literature renders migrant lives comprehensible and familiar. While one can find origin-specific anthologies (e.g., African, Caribbean, or South Asian diasporas) and destination-specific ones (e.g., Canadian, British, or US immigrant literature), this is the first collection to offer a global, comparative scope. My hope is that The Penguin Book of Migration Literature will convey the intricacy of worldwide migration patterns, the diversity of migrant experiences, and the common threads among those varied experiences.
It is the very complexity of the migrant experience that leads me to consider this an anthology of migrant literature rather than immigrant literature. Definitions can be dry, but they lend clarity, and many of the terms around migration can be loaded and confusing. “Migration” denotes any long-term movement; “emigration” is the act of leaving a place; and “immigration” refers to arrival. So all migrants may be classified as emigrants or immigrants, depending on perspective, but more realistically all migrants feel themselves to be both emigrants and immigrants at once. Yet even the most welcoming and sympathetic commentators in destination countries tend to speak of “immigrant literature” rather than the more holistic “migrant literature.” An anthology or university course titled “Immigrant Literature” elides migrants’ prior histories, suggesting lives that begin anew in a host country. I wanted to include that sometimes neglected history, which is why I begin this anthology not with arrivals but with departures—and sometimes the decision not to depart at all. Similarly, we end not with assimilation but with the possibility of returns, for homelands always linger even if only on an emotional level.
Besides the qualities of being global and multidirectional, an essential element to note about migration is that it exists in a continuum of involuntary to voluntary. Forced migrations—enslavement, “transport” (i.e., deportation to an overseas prison), trafficking, political or religious persecution, exile, expatriation—
formed the world that we know. While slavery might not have traditionally been considered within the literature of migration, I find it critical to consider the full history of people going from place to place. Therefore I have included writers like Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley, whose insights help us understand the massive forced migration known as the Atlantic slave trade.
Along with the unambiguously involuntary migrations that have shaped our current reality, many migrations fall in a gray area between involuntary and voluntary. Indentureship; war; persecution based on political activity, religion, sexuality, and other factors; lack of economic possibility: this categorical ambiguity defined the second half of the nineteenth century, and continues through the present. Zadie Smith’s sensitive novella The Embassy of Cambodia and Chris Abani’s harrowing Becoming Abigail, among other fictional sources, depict women living in a corresponding limbo. In the case of Smith’s protagonist, “It was not the first time that Fatou had wondered if she herself was a slave, but this story, brief as it was, confirmed in her own mind that she was not. After all, it was her father, and not a kidnapper, who had taken her from Ivory Coast to Ghana.” Legal trade in human beings may have been outlawed by the end of the nineteenth century, but millions of people still find themselves in Fatou’s and Abigail’s position. One of the two affecting narrators of Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Children of the Sea” writes to her lover, “i thank god you got out when you did. all the other youth federation members have disappeared.” The departed lover may have made a choice to leave Haiti, but it was no kind of choice if the other option was death. Similarly, in “An Honest Exit,” Dinaw Mengestu’s unnamed protagonist tells of his father, who “knew that if he returned home he would eventually be arrested again, and that this time he wouldn’t survive, so he took what little he had left and followed a group of men who told him that they were heading to Sudan, because it was the only way out.” As Warsan Shire poetically sums up these stories of semivoluntary migration, “no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” In all these instances, migration is simply not a choice, but rather a matter of survival.